Francisco Quinteiro Pires

On September 26, 2017, Brazilian artist Wagner Schwartz performed La Bête at the Museu de Arte Moderna in São Paulo. Inspired by Lygia Clark’s participatory sculptures Bichos and the radical conceptual propositions of Hélio Oiticica, Schwartz’s work invited the public to engage with his nude body and a mobile sculpture. One interaction—between a child, her mother, and Schwartz—was filmed and posted online. What followed was an explosion of outrage.

The performance, once confined to the gallery, spilled into the streets, Congress, and social media. Right-wing protesters called it pedophilia. Politicians demanded a criminal investigation. Violence erupted: a museum worker was physically assaulted.

Art, Politics, and the Crisis of Interpretation

At the heart of the controversy was a conflict not just about morality, but about power. As Belgian political theorist Chantal Mouffe states, moral panic often masks a refusal to engage with the political dimension of art. When aesthetic experiences are policed by moralistic standards, people risk silencing the conversations and disputes that a free society requires.

Schwartz’s performance, rather than being an isolated incident, reflects a broader historical tension in Brazil: between experimental art and authoritarian politics. In the late 1960s, under civil-military dictatorship, artists such as Clark, Oiticica, and Antonio Manuel used the body, participation, and ephemerality as means of resistance. Schwartz’s reinterpretation of Clark’s work builds upon these experimental practices.

Culture as Resistance

For the African theoretician Amílcar Cabral, anti-colonial resistance wasn’t just political. It was predominantly cultural. “Culture is simultaneously the product and instrument of the struggle,” Cabral once said. This idea echoes throughout Brazil’s radical art history. Clark and Oiticica believed that art should not just be looked at: it should be lived, embodied, and materialized. Their works demanded the presence of the spectator’s body, dissolving the artificial line between artist and audience.

This participatory ideal clashes with reactionary anxieties, which demand censorship. In 2017, the exhibition Queermuseum was canceled after right-wing campaigns accused it of promoting pedophilia and blasphemy. The reactionary rhetoric, often backed by evangelical politicians, has reduced complex aesthetic practices and theorization to sensationalist headlines.

Performance as Memory and Possibility

As the US scholar Diana Taylor argues, performance is a method of remembering and imagining. It transmits embodied knowledge—about domination, liberation, and connection. La Bête, in this sense, functions as a “citational performance,” echoing the radical gestures of the past while confronting today’s moralistic panic.

French philosopher Jacques Rancière’s concept of “the distribution of the sensible” illuminates these polarized reactions. Art like La Bête reconfigures the boundaries of what can be seen, said, and felt, unsettling dominant orders of visibility and propriety. This is why it provokes, not just moralistic judgment, but palpable fear. Because it is an invitation to imagine a freer society.

Intersubjectivity

The uproar around La Bête isn’t only about a performance. It’s about what kind of society people want to live in. One where art questions power, or one where power dictates what art can be?

For some, the future is restoration, predicated on an idealized return to patriarchal norms and ossified identities. But Schwartz’s performance—like Clark’s and Oiticica’s before him—proposes something else: a space of encounter, risk, intersubjectivity, and becoming.

In Brazil, both in 2017 and the late 1960s, defending the arts meant refusing the idea that dissent can be dangerous. Culture is not just a mirror of society, but its laboratory for imagining other worlds.

*Text adapted from research notes for a performance studies course at New York University